Big Bend dinosaurs to receive their due at park

BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, Texas - They go to hike among spindly ocotillo, brush shoulders with a peccary or pitch a tent alongside the Rio Grande.

BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, Texas — They go to hike among spindly ocotillo, brush shoulders with a peccary or pitch a tent alongside the Rio Grande.

But most visitors to Big Bend National Park leave without realizing that dinosaurs once trundled through ancient marshlands here and a reptile the size of a small airplane flapped across the big, blue west Texas sky.

That’s about to change.

Come fall, park officials will break ground on a paleontology exhibit that will explain what park geologist Don Corrick calls one of the great untold stories of Big Bend: its dinosaurs.

“The scientific significance of our fossils is big,” Corrick said, “and this is a chance to get kids interested.”

Big Bend is a diverse place, with more bird, bat and cactus species than any other national park. That diversity extends to the creatures that lived here eons ago. More than 1,200 types of fossils have been uncovered at Big Bend — also more than at any other U.S. national park.

“It’s a tremendously thick and complete record,” Corrick said.

Museums all over the world — including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the new Perot Museum in Dallas and the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin — display bones unearthed at the park. But except for a small glassed-in case that holds a few dinosaur bone replicas at a roadside pullout, they get little attention at Big Bend.

“This is a letdown,” Corrick said of the mattress-sized display case that includes a jawbone, rib fragments and part of a turtle. “They’re not even real fossils, and this is not how you’d find them — lying on a bed of sand.”

Two shelters to house the exhibit will be built just off the main park road between Persimmon Gap and Panther Junction.

Life-size touchable bronze skulls — one a cast of a 7-foot set of jaws from a crocodilelike dinosaur found in the hills, the other a tyrannosaur — will be displayed on an outdoor patio. A small parking lot, picnic shelter and restrooms already exist at the site.

“We’ve been pushing for this for 10 years,” Corrick said

The project will cost about $400,000. The nonprofit Friends of Big Bend National Park has already raised $220,000. The National Park Foundation will add $100,000 if the Friends group reaches $275,000 in donations.